Every note in the archive that names Assumption Testing: summaries, key takeaways and links to the original essays, episodes and posts. Ask a question below to get a cited answer from just these notes’ authors.
“Continuous Discovery Habits* turns five this year. And to celebrate we are reading the book together. Each month, I am releasing an in-depth reading guide that includes: - The chapters we will be reading - A preview of the most important concepts we'll be learning about - Short videos you”
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine whether the wave of AI prototyping tools (Replit, V0, Bolt, Lovable, WindSurf) genuinely helps product discovery work. They argue these tools can rapidly produce interactive…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that teams new to outcome-oriented product management lack several hard skills, so leaders must deliberately build them for pilot teams to succeed during an organizational…
Teresa Torres profiles Gary Clift, a Senior Director of Product for a travel-industry API, who used continuous discovery habits to address why customers were resisting migration to a new version of his company's API…
Teresa Torres argues that API teams need product discovery because customer-facing APIs are products, and gaps in them cost adoption. She identifies six recurring usability problems developers hit when learning a new…
Teresa Torres argues that teams should adopt continuous discovery through small, sustainable habits rather than attempting a full transformation at once, which often leads to frustration. She adapts Nisha Vora's SPICEY…
This Product in Practice profile follows Eva Spexard, Head of Operations and People at Passion.io, who applies continuous discovery habits to the employee experience rather than to a product. She treats employees as…
Teresa Torres argues against generative AI tools that try to replace real discovery work, such as synthetic customer interviews, auto-generated opportunity solution trees, or AI-drafted artifacts. She explains that…
Convo's product team set out to test assumptions about a feature letting Deaf users bring an interpreter into a Zoom meeting, but running those tests over Zoom introduced confusing meta-tasks and technical problems…
Teresa Torres argues that product trios, small cross-functional teams of product, design, and engineering, should jointly own both discovery (deciding what to build) and delivery. She contrasts this with waterfall…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often misuse customer interviews by spending time evaluating solution ideas, which yields unreliable feedback because people overestimate their future behavior. Interviews are…
Sandrine Veillet, VP of Global Product at WebMD, describes how she introduced continuous discovery into a large, previously waterfall-style product organization. She began by building a product vision and simple…
Teresa Torres and community members address a common problem: a stakeholder, such as a CEO, brings a solution idea that is unconnected to the team's current outcome and discovery work. The article argues against simply…
Teresa Torres introduces opportunity solution trees as a visual tool that lets product trios map the paths from a desired outcome to customer opportunities, candidate solutions, and assumption tests. The article argues…
This Product Talk announcement introduces Ellen Brandenberger, a product coach and Director of Product at Stack Overflow, as a new instructor for the Product Talk Academy. It frames the expansion as part of the…
Teresa Torres reports on the second part of her inaugural CDH Benchmark Survey, which asked product teams about their discovery habits. She argues that many people doubt that continuous discovery exists in practice…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery habits apply to early-stage startups, not just mature products, even before a product or customers exist. She illustrates the ideal path with fictional founders who set a…
Teresa Torres argues that effective product teams should pair two discovery activities every week: continuous customer interviewing to find opportunities, and assumption testing to evaluate solutions. Visualizing this…
Teresa Torres argues that product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, should be a continuous activity rather than a project-based phase at the start of a initiative. She contrasts it with delivery, the work…
Teresa Torres shares six guiding principles for effective product discovery, distilled by her co-instructor Jeff Merrell from a design course on prototyping solutions. The principles cover building empathy for a…
Teresa Torres argues that the popular "We believe... will result in... we will have confidence when..." hypothesis format is quick but insufficient for sound experiment design. She explains that teams should test the…
Teresa Torres argues that the Lean Startup loop of Build, Measure, Learn starts in the wrong place, and that teams should instead Learn, Build, Measure. Building first means writing code for features that often fail…
Torres argues that teams should stop testing ideas at random and instead be strategic about what they experiment on. Rather than prioritizing a list of ideas by gut feel, teams should estimate expected outcomes…
"It can feel like you are the lone champion pushing for change in your organization." That's why we are reading Continuous Discovery Habits together throughout 2026. 📚 The book turns five this year and many of you have bought and read it. But reading isn't the same as doing. So we are reading…